Finally..

Okay, thanks to the expertise and aid of my friend doza, here is the last map.

Land Use 

Delaware Maps

 

Capstone Project

Unfortuntaely, I had to make a few modifications to my capstone project. And, I really should have anticipated the problems I ran into. First of all, I am some what savy with GIS and have been using ArcMap and manipulating data for over a year and a half. Having said that, I am WELL aware of the problems you can run into with data availability, data manipulation and data clean up. This project was no exception...So, although my maps were not what I originally set out to do and show, I think that the amount of problems and cleanup and lack of data availability were all part of the project.

One thing about GIS, especially if you are unfamiliar, is that it is difficult to realize all the time and frustration that goes into one lonely map...For data to display in ArcMap it has to be in a particular format...okay, this is easy enough--convert it from excel to a readable format. Usually this is a seemless process. But, sometimes, if the cells are not formatted the appropriate way, they are unreadable in ArcMap. It really becomes a mystery, trying to find what went wrong from one click to the next. And another caveat, problems are typically unique. Or they happen once or twice and by the time the second time rolls around--you have no idea how in the heck you rectified the problem before.

Okay, so the data is in the correct format...now can it join to existing data in ArcMap? Do they have similar fields? For example, joining data and shapefiles by tract is a common method. But in one file a tract (census divisions) is depicted as "000501" and your outside data is "501" or "501.12". In that current state there is no way to join the one file to the other. What next? Data cleanup--let the fun begin...

Once this is done, typically, the data is ready to join. And then the real fun of map creation happens. Unfortunately, you have to work with what you have. Unless you have an unlimited amount of time to order or create your own data files, you are usually limited to what is available over governement sites and usually this is limited to the past two decades of census collection.

Maybe this somewhat explains the arduous nature of mapping...and, I think I even simplified it a bit.